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Bespoke fashion has transformed many of us from off-the-rack mannequins to flaunters of our intrinsic uniqueness.

A key motivation for having garments custom made rests on the fact that mass-produced mall fashions are tailored to the everyman measurements of Big Mac-munching electricians from Peoria. Sliding on your first tailor-made shirt or suit makes you realize how over-puffed you’ve been all your life because of that guy.

Until now, the trend to custom fitting has largely focused on the ankle up.

Consider, however, bespoke footwear.

Here’s the proposition: You move from shoe consumer to shoe designer, with the power to envision your own distinctive footwear fit and identity. An old-school shoemaker then executes your concept with made-to-measure footwear unlike anyone else in the room.

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Such luxury obviously comes at a price: $350 to $1,800, depending on style, leather quality and how deformed your feet are.

It also requires a level of effort and creative input unknown to those of us whose lifelong footwear-purchasing has been limited to shoehorning on a couple of wingtips at the mall every few months.

Shoemaking being a dying art these days, the first challenge in the search for customized boots is finding a willing craftsman.

Nick Marinos, a second-generation shoemaker (Nick’s Custom Boots & Shoe Repair is at 167 Dupont St.; nickscustomboots.com), works out of a midtown shop featuring the musty fragrance of leather, piles of scuffed shoes awaiting renewal and a collection of disembodied foot moulds around which he builds one-of-a-kind shoes.

Many of his orders come from police forces across the continent looking for custom boots for officers. But he also counts among his clients celebrities, style mavens and ordinary Torontonians with malformed feet who are seeking the comfort of custom.

They find it worth an extra couple of hundred dollars, says Marinos, who started in the shoe business at 16 under the tutelage of his father and is now 48.

There’s the guy who has a collection of shoes made by Marinos, who comes to him for footwear built upon the gummy rubber soles his tender tootsies adore.

Or the freak of nature with the size 22 feet for whom a trip to the mall is mere folly.

But we can all consider the customizability of footwear: A fashion-forward dandy could choose a closet full of purple-soled shoes as a social calling card.

Or he might decide to be defined by a revival blue-suede-shoe look.

Neither of these specific options is actually advisable. But you get the idea.

Creating footwear you won’t find at Winners begins with blue-skying a concept.

Paging through men’s magazines, I picked out a pair of Cole Haan chukka boots, with overstitching around the sole, that popped off the page.

Marinos and I riffed.

A darker chocolate colour to the leather would be nice, I offered. Lots of texture on the surface, he suggested.

To create each mould, Marinos measures your feet with a level of detail those slider devices at Town Shoes could never capture — 14 spots across the foot, heel, instep, ankle, calf and thigh.

“You have very, very high runner’s arches,” he tells me, measuring tape in hand. “It’s a little freaky.”

Other revelations emerge from foot forensics: It turns out my right foot is a half-size longer than the left — an apparently common human deformity.

Leather is ordered (from Italy), materials are gathered and the shoes are created in the rabbit-warren basement of the shop.

In a few weeks I’m back in Marinos shop trying on a pair of shoes more luxurious than any I’ve stepped into during a lifetime of shoe wearing.

The only risk: Entering the world of pricey custom footwear is a like sampling crack cocaine.

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